(1) Field of the Invention
The invention pertains generally to technology utilized to provide and access services at hospitality establishments. More specifically, the invention relates to leveraging a push notification capability of a mobile application installed on a mobile device and used by a guest of a hospitality establishment to access a first service to also send event-triggered invitations to upgrade the guest's service entitlement for a second service offered by the hospitality establishment.
(2) Description of the Related Art
Internet access is a service offered by many hospitality establishments. For example, an Internet café may offer Internet access to attract customers and a hotel may offer Internet access to attract and/or meet the expectations of guests. Besides attracting users to further the establishment's primary business focus, providing Internet access is often also a revenue stream in and of itself; for instance, many hospitality establishments offer tiered Internet options such as a “Basic” (free or low-cost) package with low bandwidth suitable for simple email checking on a single device only, in addition to one or more “Premium” (higher cost) packages that have increased bandwidth speeds and/or other capabilities such as support for multiple devices per user. Thus, although a hospitality establishment may specialize in another service such lodging and/or retail food services, the establishment also benefits financially from sales of its Internet access package(s).
One problem with the state of the art is that sometimes a user of a hospitality establishment may initially choose a lower valued (e.g., free) Internet package only to later find that the attainable speeds at that service entitlement are too slow for the user's intended online activities. For example, after electing for the basic Internet option at initial signup, a user may try to stream movies from an online content provider and discover that the video playback suffers from low resolution and/or frequently pauses to buffer. Often the user may be willing at this point to pay more to the hospitality establishment in order to upgrade their Internet experience; however, it is typically difficult for an already-logged-in user to figure out how such an upgrade to a premium Internet package can be initiated.
One common approach to make users aware of the upgrade process is to provide a welcome web page after a user first logs in that includes hypertext form buttons or links that the user can click to upgrade to a higher speed Internet package by agreeing to an additional charge. Since newly logged in users are not usually interested in immediately upgrading, the welcome page typically includes a textual recommendation that the user should bookmark in their web browser or otherwise save the uniform resource locator (URL) of the welcome page to thereby enable the user to return in the future if an upgrade is desired.
Although a user returning to the welcome page URL does allow the user to perform a bandwidth upgrade, many users will not carefully read or bookmark the welcome page and will instead immediately browse to external websites as soon as they are logged in, thereby losing the content of the welcome screen. Should these users later desire to upgrade, they will not remember or be able to find the URL of the welcome page, and the hospitality establishment will lose upgrade revenue if the user gives up.
Attempts have been made to make the upgrade process easier for users inclined to ignore the initial welcome screen. In one attempt, a separate, minimized browser window (e.g., a pop-up or pop-behind) is opened upon initial login that includes a bandwidth upgrade control panel. However, modern browsers by default block popups. Furthermore, even if the new window is allowed to be opened by the browser, many users ignore or immediately close new windows without considering their purpose.
Another attempt involves keeping the bandwidth upgrade options visible to the user at all time during browsing by forcing the user to browse the web within a hypertext markup language (HTML) frame. Outside the border of the frame but still visible within the browser content window are Internet package upgrade buttons. However, this method is undesirable at least because many websites do not operate properly when viewed within a frame and some websites specifically include JavaScript to “break out” of any such enclosing frames since it is a security risk. Furthermore, many mobile devices capable of Internet browsing have small screen resolutions and it is undesirable to constantly occupy valuable screen space with upgrade buttons that are, for many users, never used.
Another attempt involves dynamically hijacking the user's HTTP connections in order to insert extra HTML and/or JavaScript to provide Internet upgrade options at certain times while the user is browsing the web. For example, an intermediate device such as a gateway at the hotel positioned between the client device and a web server on the Internet may insert an “upgrade Internet access” button or message to that effect in the HTML content of a web page that is being sent to the client device for display in the web browser. Alternatively, rather than modifying web page content, the web page content may be completely replaced with a redirect back to the establishment's welcome page at various points during the user's Internet session in order to see if the user wishes to upgrade.
However, in addition to the fact that interfering with the user's web traffic in these manners is difficult to do without also breaking the user's existing web sessions, these techniques provide no benefit at all when the user's browser is employing a hypertext transfer protocol secure (HTTPS) connection. The very purpose of HTTPS is to maintain the security and integrity of webpage content and web sessions; it is not possible for an intermediate gateway device to hijack these encrypted sessions to insert content or redirect the user in a way that will not cause the user's browser to display prominent security warnings.
At best modifying web content as it is passed to the client device for display in a web browser could only work if the user has requested to view an unencrypted web page for display in a web browser. In practice, many mobile devices run other applications such as custom content provider apps that are not web browsers but that receive (or send) large amounts of data from the Internet such as when playing an online movie within the app. Modifying network traffic destined to these apps by an intermediate gateway would not necessarily result in the user seeing any Internet upgrade messages and may instead cause the app to crash or merely display a cryptic error message due to the unrecognized data inserted by the gateway.
It would be desirable for a hospitality establishment to be able to offer users an easy way to upgrade their Internet session without requiring the user to take any unrealistic actions such as bookmarking or saving the URL of a welcome page and without resorting to hijacking the user's ongoing network connections.